This allows us to complete a daily task like going out for coffee by breaking it into steps: getting out of our office building, navigating to the coffee shop, and once there, obtaining the coffee. This strategy helps us to handle obstacles easily. For example, if the elevator is broken, we can revise how we get out of the building without changing the other steps. While there is a great deal of behavioral evidence demonstrating humans' skill at these complicated tasks, it has been difficult to devise experimental scenarios that allow precise characterization of the computational strategies we use to solve problems. In a new study, MIT researchers have successfully modeled how people deploy different decision-making strategies to solve a complicated task ' in this case, predicting how a ball will travel through a maze when the ball is hidden from view. The human brain cannot perform this task perfectly because it is impossible to track all of the possible trajectories in parallel,...
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